About three weeks ago, my family and I journeyed up north to visit the lands of San Francisco. Our reasons for visiting the area where varied. My brother was going to visit his girlfriend up in college, I was going in order to visit San Francisco State University, my Dad was going because he loves driving on any kind of road trip, while my Mom and youngest brother went simply because they didn’t want to feel lonely. I usually despise road-trips as much as I despise a female who refuses to make me a sandwich, but I actually don’t mind traveling up to northern California. First off, northern California is only a six hour drive from Orange County, the drive is often scenic and beautiful, and most importantly I get to remain in the state of California. Any other kind of road trip is unacceptable because it requires more than a day’s drive, often across boring landscapes, and they require me to leave the state of California. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m all for expanding my horizons and I have been on countless cross-country roadtrips throughout my lifetime. However, I’ve quickly come to realize that California is the best state in the union and leaving it would be like giving up a Ferrari Enzo in order drive a Toyota Prius. It’s pointless, unrewarding, and stupid.

With this in mind, I was looking forward to my journey up north. I thought it would be a nice chance for me to escape the stresses of my daily life here in southern California, and at the very least, it would be an opportunity for me to ride my bike in a different environment. Now, I have traveled up north in the past and the experiences where disappointing. The people up north are liberal, and live an entirely different lifestyle than those of us down here. While the north does have some beautiful scenery, I always felt that the general attitude and lifestyle of the people ultimately kept me from truly enjoying what the area had to offer. But San Francisco promised to remedy this. Whereas I visited the most liberal and admittedly less populated areas of northern California in Santa Cruz, and Sebastapol, San Francisco was a heavily populated and bustling metropolis. I thought this would be much more akin to my lifestyle here in southern California and thus, I had very high hopes for San Francisco. Despite my optimism, my trip up to San Francisco ultimately disappointed me.

To start things off, there’s nothing to do in San Francisco. Southern California is packed with a ton of attractions that can keep a tourist busy for weeks, whereas San Francisco just has the Golden Gate Bridge, which is admittedly impressive, but can only entertain a tourist for a few hours. San Francisco State University felt like a cold, barren, and heartless campus. The fact that I visited the campus while it was raining outside, and in the middle of a furlough week probably didn’t help those negative sentiments all that much, but I still found the school to be disappointing. The idea of living in San Francisco was very appealing to me, and San Francisco State University appeared to be one of the better Cal State schools, but as I spent time on campus I came to the conclusion that the school and the city just weren’t a right fit for me. The last and final disappointment however, was the fact that riding a bike in San Francisco absolutely sucks.

San Francisco, and northern California in general, are considered to be the most bike friendly areas in the country second only to Portland Oregon. However, I found that this simply wasn’t the case. San Francisco is hilly, lacks bike lanes, and is simply too crowded to safely ride a bike in.  Now I did manage to ride across the Golden Gate Bridge, which was actually pretty cool, but given all of the cycling lore that comes from up north, I was expecting a city with an intricate network of bike lanes, and thousands of cyclists. Instead, all I got was one measly bike trail for the Golden Gate Bridge that was about three miles long, and was paved worse than the trails that I ride here at home.

While I did leave San Francisco feeling a little distraught, and disappointed, I do recognize that the city and its surrounding areas do  have their merits. The scenery and geography around San Francisco is beautiful. At one moment you could be emerged in a forest, and the next moment you could be riding along the pacific coast, which is pretty damn cool. The architecture is awesome, and I happen to love all of the buildings that integrate corrugated aluminum into their designs. As disappointed as I was at the fact that  San Francisco has little to to offer tourists, or visiting cyclists, it does offer a lot for someone who knows the city and its surrounding areas well. I personally think that if I lived and belonged in the city, I would love it. However, the simple fact of the matter is that I’m too conditioned to the fast paced, and conservative lifestyle of southern California to truly enjoy San Francisco.

As any true filmmaker should, I brought my handy flip video camera with me on the trip and made a mini documentary. I plan to produce a variety of other small documentaries in the near future, under a category that I’m calling MEI Documentary Films. The purpose of these films is to simply document and display the mini-adventures that I partake in throughout my life and to hopefully improve my skills in telling an “off-the-cuff” story. I have a few other documentaries planned to be released and so hopefully I’ll be able to produce a constant stream of narrative movies, and documentaries in the near future.

Life’s full of irony, and today I was just hit with a heavy dose of it. Right after making a post about how I could just sit back and relax in regards to getting into college, I realized that I had a major issue upon me.  Tuesday marks the start of the new semester, and for seniors at my high school, that means switching our religion classes. Our school offers four one0semester religion classes for seniors to choose from there’s Comparative Religion, Philosophy, Peace and Justice, and Christian Lifestyles.  My two projected religion classes were Comparative Religion and Philosophy. However, upon getting my schedule yesterday, it turns out  that I was enrolled in Peace and Justice, as opposed to the Philosophy course that I was supposed to take this coming semester.

Now as a student, I’m as low key as they come. I don’t care what teachers I get, nor do I fancy transferring in and out of classes. Basically, once I get my initial schedule at the start of the school year, it’s set in stone. However, with this schedule mishap I had to take an exception. On all of my college apps I put that I was taking Philosophy, which meant that taking Peace and Justice would cause serious consistency issues in regards to my application and transcripts. Having such a consistency issue would mean that my admittance to whatever colleges I got into, would be revoked once they reviewed my final transcript and noticed that I had two completely different classes listed.

So I went to go see my counselor today to rectify the problem but as it turns out, I’m shit out of luck. Basically, with the way my schedule is, and with the lack of empty seats available in other classes, no amount of mutations to my schedule would make it possible for me to take a Philosophy course. The biggest issue comes from the fact that I take journalism which is only offered during my second period. Because of that, the amount of workarounds that could be done to my schedule were too few to get me into a Philosophy class. It’s a long and complex thing to discuss, but it basically means that I have the one kind of schedule that can’t be fixed to solve the problem.

I am usually the last person to absolve myself of blame, but this time I think I just got screwed by circumstance. First off, on my original sign up sheet I clearly listed philosophy, and I met all of the pre-reqs to get into the class. I know this because my counselor and I looked it up just to be sure,  it was simply entered into the computer wrong.  Second, I was under the assumption that I was taking Philosophy in the months leading up to this event, so it isn’t like I saw this coming and just decided to act on it now. This basically came out of nowhere, and aside from raising hell about the issue, there’s not much that I can do about it.

Now the good thing is that I won’t have to change around my schedule to accommodate a Philosophy class, which is good considering that I like my teachers, and all of the people in my classes. The other good thing is that Peace and Justice is a UC and Cal State approved course, which means that changing the course shouldn’t be an issue for most colleges. What this does mean though, is that even if I do get accepted into a college, it won’t be 100% approved until I call them and explain my situation. If that doesn’t work out for some reason and my acceptance gets revoked, then all hell will probably break lose.

Sigh, sometimes I just gotta vent.

As a senior in high school I get asked two questions quite frequently. The first is “Are you a Senior now?” to which I obviously respond yes. The second question that follows is “Oh, where are you applying to College?” Every person that I have met this past year has asked me that question, and answering it has quickly become one of the most annoying aspects that I’ve had to deal with this year. Just bear in mind, I’ve had to endure the combined forces of Alex Guichet’s Photoblog, and this Twitter phenomenon that is taking the world by storm,  so I know what annoying is. Regardless, I usually respond with the typical. “Oh, well I want to major in film right now so Chapman’s my number one choice because they have a great Film program.” Now if I’m lucky, the person will have heard of Chapman and will simply stop questioning me at that point, but more often than not they ask me where else I’m applying to. Of course, this isn’t a very fair question to ask me because I’ve applied to about ten different colleges thus far, and asking me to list all of them, is a little ridiculous. However, being the polite conversationalist that I am I proceed to list my college choices.

“Well second there’s LMU, then Notre Dame, UCLA would be great to get into, but I’m also applying to UCSD, and UCSB.” “What about the Cal States?” “Oh well I applied to a bunch of those too, Cal State Long Beach has a great program, so does Cal State Northridge, in fact I just got into Cal State Northridge” “Oh well congratulations do you think you’ll go there?” “Well that depends on where else I get accepted to” “When do you hear back?” “Oh probably around march” “Ah, so where else have you applied?” “I also applied to San Francisco State University, and Cal State Monterey Bay, and that’s about it.” “Wow, Monterey Bay!?”

I think you get the picture.  The simple fact of the matter is that asking a Senior which college they are going to is about as compulsory as asking a pregnant woman whether she’s having a boy or girl.  In the eyes of the interrogator, it’s a simple subject to delve into,  and it’s also personal enough and often complex enough to make the conversation interesting. Plus there’s the added bonus that  the helpless person being interrogated will feel as if the interrogator actually cares about where they are going to college, because as well know, college is very serious business. The thing that the interrogator often forgets though is the fact that person being interrogated has been asked the same question three times a week for the past year, and they have already heard every possible response that someone can give them. This obviously makes the conversation about as exciting as telling a person a joke that they’ve already heard. By that I mean it’s not exciting, and that such a conversation would only serve to boost the self esteem of the person who is telling the joke. Which of course is simply bad conversation etiquette.

Putting that subject aside, I’ve finally finished my college applications. It was a long, tiring, painful, and downright stressful process, but I got it done, and a huge burden has been lifted off of my back. My final list of colleges that I applied to (in order of where I want to get in) is:

1. Chapman

2. UCLA

3. Notre Dame

4. LMU

5 .UCSD

6. UCSB

7. CSULB

8. CSUN

9. SFSU

10. CSUMB

It’s quite an extensive list, but it is packed with very reputable colleges all which should offer me a great education and a great place to live by attending any one of them. As I’ve expressed previously, I only applied to places where I thought that I would enjoy attending. The idea was to make it so that being accepted to any one of these colleges would be a victory, and so far things are looking really good. I’ve been accepted to Cal State Northridge as well as San Francisco State University, which are two of the nicer schools in the Cal State System. Hopefully I’ll be accepted to at least one of my top 5 schools as well.

As exciting as picking a college is, it’s also incredibly stressful. Filling out applications is like being asked to bake a cake for the freshman girl at Conelley that you really have a crush on, but are too afraid to talk to. On one hand, you know that making a good cake will make her like you. But on the other hand, you have no idea what kind of cake she wants, and if you make her the wrong one then your chances with her are screwed forever. This kind of situation made writing my college essays particularly painful. Most essays expected that I write about an aspect of my life that was important, and influential to me. Sounds easy enough on paper right? After all I am a blogger and all I do is write about myself for 90% of the time. However, when it came to actually sitting down and writing the essays, it turned out that I was simply crippled.

I couldn’t think of a topic that would be interesting enough to catch the attention of the admissions representatives. Not only that, I often had to compress my essay to be about 500 words long. In the interest of extending our cake metaphor, it’s like finding out that you have to make the cake in less then twenty four hours, you only have 10 dollars to spend on it, and you’re forced to buy the ingredients at El Metate Market. It can be done of course, but it’s just not the ideal situation to go about doing things. Anyways, this kind of pressure meant that I ended up spending six hour days writing stupid 500 word essays for college. As I keep mentioning, the process was painful, embarrassing, and sometimes disgraceful, especially considering that most of them turned out badly anyways.

That aside, I’m still strangely confident in my abilities to get accepted into my top 5 colleges. Maybe it’s the fact that I’ve already been accepted to 2 colleges, and I’m technically 2-0 as far as my acceptance to rejection ratio is concerned. Outside of that, I also think it has to do with the fact that I really didn’t feel the need to prove myself to the colleges that I was applying to. Obviously, I tried to impress them, and I gave them my heartfelt responses to all of their ridiculous application questions, but I didn’t get desperate. Looking back at my resume I realized that I’ve been involved in a plethora of real activities in high school, and that I’ve accomplished quite a bit in my high school career.  Nowhere in my application did bullshit clubs like Key Club, or NHS, show up, nor did I have an inflated number of service hours for doing silly things at my Church (Ahem, Mr. Guichet). I guess one could say that I applied to college on my own terms, I applied where I wanted to apply to, and told them what I wanted them to hear, not what THEY wanted to hear.

As March comes closer, which means a barrage of acceptance and denial letters, I sometimes question my college choice. Being a filmmaker is such an erratic lifestyle, with so many ups and downs. Sometimes I feel as if I’m on the top of the world and seriously have a shot at making it big. Other times I feel as if I’m talentless and question whether I should really be pursuing film. Then there’s those fleeting moments of artistic bliss, which catch me by surprise every couple of weeks. They’re a euphoria of creativity, potential, and imagination, and when I experience them, I know that majoring in film is the right path for me.

With College apps out of the way, I’ve overcome a major hurdle in my senior year. Now all I have to do is sit back and relax until I start getting accepted into place. Or in the case that I don’t, perhaps start considering the air force.

So today is the one year anniversary of the creation of this site.  As I’ve mentioned in my past posts, this site started off as a deal between Alex Guichet and I. I promised that I would start blogging, if Alex would train himself to the point in which he could climb fences. One year later, I’m holding my end of the bargain, but I have yet to see Alex climb a chain link fence. I like to think of this as a testament to my golden rule which simply states “Always Deliver”.

Looking back, I started this site with a whole lot of negativity. My first official blog post was incredibly pessimistic, and my first few rants were simply vulgar. While I do find my highly negative, satirical rants to be hilarious, I’m slightly disappointed by the fact that I don’t wield the same kind of fire power anymore. It must be all the optimistic writing for the school newspaper softening me up. Regardless, I think it’s profound looking back at my old posts, and simply seeing how my ideals and values have evolved throughout this year. On one hand, some of my values are still firmly in place, some I have simply forgotten, while others have downright changed.  Of course, this is nothing mind blowing, it’s what happens in life as people mature, but it’s still kind of cool being able to track the progression of my maturity.

So how am I different today than from who I was one year ago when I wrote my first posts for this blog? Well for one thing I’m not pissed off as hell at Alex’s neighbor for “disappearing” after homecoming. I feel more comfortable with my life and my surroundings, and I think I’m doing a much better job at balancing out my life. If there’s one thing that I’ve learned how to do over this past year, it’s how to think critically. Now I don’t mean that bullshit term that is used to describe someone that is smart. I mean actually thinking critically, as in, constantly reflecting on my lifestyle, actions, and habits, in order to find my flaws and to hopefully control them. By doing this, I think I’ve grown to enjoy life in a much greater capacity. I feel free from most of the societal limitations that people meld to, and as a whole, I’m living life based on my own dreams and desires.

Of course, I still feel as if I haven’t accomplished much in this past year. I wish I made more movies than I ended up making. I should be a way faster swimmer in comparison to what I am now. Finally, I also wish that I was better at piano. However, not being able to accomplish these things has taught me an important lesson, and that is that the words “wish” and “should” need to be eliminated from my vocabulary.  I’ve learned that people will remember and judge me based on what I accomplished, not on what I wanted to accomplish, and thus I need to be more engaged in the process of accomplishing things. I suppose this all stems from discipline, and that this discipline will become more refined over time, but it’s still a lifestlye that needs to be adapted.

People often complain about how bad this past year was, with the economic recession, the wars in the middle east, swine flu, and the electing of a black man as a president. But I personally think that this year was much better than people give it credit for. After all, it was in this year that the king of pop (who is subsequently the king of child predators), died only to have people superficially love him  post posthumously. That single occurrence alone made this past year worthwhile. To top it off, the world’s richest black man Tiger Woods, revealed himself to be one of the world’s greatest “players”. Not only did Woods sleep with at least a dozen or so girls, but he did so knowing that he had a super model wife at a home, and a billion dollars still in his pocket. It appears as if Tiger Wood’s only rival is Bill Clinton, who performed an equally impressive feat when he traveled to North Korea to hit on rescue, the two American reporters that those commie bastards captured. With all of this media drama, I simply can’t fathom how people can complain about this past year. Isn’t making someone famous and than ruthlessly bringing about their eventual demise the whole point of having celebrities?

On a lighter note, I feel blessed to have developed such great friendships this past year. My friends have truly become like family to me, and I owe a great deal of my livelihood to them. Whenever I want to make a movie, they’re the first ones to volunteer, and they always give their best efforts in the process. When hanging out, they’re pleasant, fun, and enjoyable to be with. In general, there’s virtually no drama, backstabbing, or other bullshit that comes between us, and that’s what I think the mark of true friendship is. Obviously, I could go on and on about all of the wonderful experiences that I’ve had with my friends this past year, but I would just like to highlight a single friend of mine and that is Melissa Costa.

Like most of my friendships, I don’t really know how my friendship with Melissa started. I knew her in my freshman science class, but we didn’t actually get to know each other until that dark period in my life when I was involved with a quincenera. Since then, Melissa and I have forged a very strong and rewarding friendship. Whereas most of the woman in my life are completely crazy, Melissa comes with just a tad bit less craziness making her my last beacon of hope for females. Of course, Melissa is still pretty crazy, and not in the good way. She thought it would be cute to change up her hair so that it looked bad, she Oreo cookied my car for no real reason, and then she performed the worst of offenses by stealing my rice krispies one day. Obviously, I was a little peeved off at Melissa for giving in to her inferior feminine ways, but she has now found her place and is  repenting for these past transgressions by making me pies.  What sets Melissa apart from most people is the fact that she’s a genuine friend. Most people have superficial friendships which work great when things are going well in life, but they often collapse when a little commitment or dedication is required. My experience has been the complete opposite with Melissa. I can easily come off as a picky, arrogant jerk and thus I often give Melissa  a ton of crap. If you couldn’t tell by all of her “pranks”, she gives me a ton of crap too. Yet, despite the fact that we reveal our flaws to each other, we are still able to laugh and enjoy being friends with one another, which is what I value most in a person.

So what lies for me in the future? Well there’s a lot of things that I am looking forward to in this coming year. First and foremost, I’m still trying to enjoy my last five or so months of high school. I still have a lot to accomplish with swimming, journalism, academic decathlon, and just general schoolwork, and it’s a shame that my time in high school is coming to an end.  After high school comes college, in which I hope to major in Film. I have already been accepted to Cal State Northridge, and San Francisco State University, both schools with some solid film programs, and hopefully I’ll get accepted into more great film schools come March. I’ve decided that I never want to live a life that is dictated by a 9-5 job for some corporation. Instead, a life that is comparable to that of a free lancer sounds more appealing to me.  Fortunately, the film industry offers this kind of  lifestyle, and even if I don’t get into film and end up taking over my dad’s company, I will still be able to live this kind of lifestyle. My major goal in life as of now, is to simply live it by doing things that make me a better person. I want to take complete responsibility for my actions so that way I will never have anyone else to blame if I find myself in tough times. What I really want, is to live life independently from the societal burdens and sheep-like mentality which I feel diminish the eternal fire of the human spirit.  Of course, wanting and achieving are two completely different things, and I will have a lot in store for me this upcoming year. But with this blog, we’ll at least be able to see how it all pans out.